Thursday, November 14, 2013

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Likes Tim Hortons Coffee!

The mayor of Toronto is an alcoholic, a drug user (cocaine), and many other things that make him unsuitable to hold any political office. The city of Toronto is trying really hard to get him to resign or take a leave of absence but there's not much they can do if he refuses to act in an honorable and responsible manner.

It's really hard to find anything likeable about the man but I did notice that he likes Tim Hortons coffee. Look at what's in his hand as he walks down Danforth Street in drunken stupor! He can't be all bad, can he?

But according to reportage I've heard, all certain suburbanites care about is that he's keeping property taxes down, never mind that he's been lying outrageously to everyone for the last year. Hint: if he's lying about himself, what makes you think he's telling the truth about anything else? And will Toronto still be liveable in 10 years, if they don't invest now in transit and infrastructure?

He doesn't have to try very hard to fool the suburbanites of Ford Nation. Under his administration the city's budget and taxes have increased to record numbers, and its surplus has been almost halved. You'd think they'd notice their tax bill is higher than it was under the previous mayor, wouldn't you?

I don't live in T.O. I'm basing this on some guy interviewed by the CBC the other morning, who was afraid of "leftists at City Hall". OK, not a sign of rational consideration, but somewhere under there, seemed to be something about taxes.

So, what the hell is his appeal to "Ford Nation"? Just plain scare-mongering? Whipping up suburbs-vs-downtown enmity? I weep fot my native city.

I think the suburbs vs downtown dynamic is a key part of it. As you likely know (but other readers may not) it was not so long ago that what is now called The City of Toronto was actually six separate municipalities. That merger was forced upon citizens by the Conservative gov't of Mike Harris (of which Ford's father was a member). It was widely believed that a primary motivation for the merger was to overwhelm the more progressive voters of the original city of Toronto with voters from the more conservative suburbs. And that's largely what has happened. I think many of the suburban voters don't really think of themselves as citizens of Toronto and take delight in saddling us with a gov't that does not actually reflect our values. It'd be like the citizens of Texas getting to elect the mayor of New York.

I have never vited in municipal elections as they don't matter to me BUT I loved Ford winning. In fact I've met him and have friends who know him by mutual name.he's an incredible worker and won peoples support there and then the left wing once again was taking our money for their gain and this was noticed(stop the gravy train) and then some sense of the extreme and Un Canadian left wing social activists forcing the city to justify their "values". So taught them a lesson its our city too.Toronto is in bad shape these years but Forb made it better in appearances until this drug issue.At least he made Toronto look like cool hipsters to America.I hope he stays as the injustice and unkindness in the city establishment etc makes his drug thin irrelevant in a moral tale.I hope runs again and let the voters decide about the drug and crime thing.At least the left wing now sees drugs as bad.Back to Toronto the good. Which meant back then a very puritan Protestant society relative to America.

There you go, Eamon Knight. There I was, futilely struggling to explain the type of mentality that leads someone to support Rob Ford, and then Mr. Byers helpfully provides an actual, living example. Much appreciated, Robert!

Speaking of Tim Hortons, I was just in Ireland last month and was amused to see that Spar (the Irish version of 7-11) serves Tim Hortons coffee. I was stunned. It's pretty normal to see US brands abroad, but Canadian?

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

Sandwalk

The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

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Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.